Shot through

I almost never delete an image. (Yes, that does require a LOT of storage.)

But here’s a good example of why I hang on to them. I made this image nearly three and half years ago; I was trying to photograph the way the water from the lawn sprinklers looked in the sun; when I made the images, none of them came out the way I wanted them to. There is a very good chance this was because I wasn’t all that sure about what I was doing. But I kept them: you just never know.

And then I spotted this while I was looking at some older stuff. Now, let me be the first to say that this still isn’t quite what I wanted to get. But, in a way, it’s better that what I thought I was after. The way that water is shot across the image and the way it obscures some of the markers are things I didn’t notice when I made the image. Or any of the other times since then that I’ve looked at it. It took until now for my eye to see what’s been there all along.

Oh, yes, I do the very same thing. I notice all kinds of fatal errors early on that frequently turn into “smallish problems” after I let them rest for a while. There’s a very slight chance that I am my own worst critic….

After I download a bunch of files I can tell right away which ones are the obvious losers and I send them on their way to pixel heaven. Sometimes I know the losers 1/250th/sec after I take the shots. This is not to say all the shots on my hard drives are good. They’re just not the obvious losers. They are the subtle losers.